Complete, pragmatic and a top reference for architects ( mtarrani )

Part I consists of a single chapter that defines B2B application integration, and how to leverage your existing assets and make a sound business case to bring this about. It also provides a quick overview of the key role middleware plays and emphasizes the fact that a truly integrated suite of applications needs to have a built-in mechanism for synchronizing and responding to business events. This is a key point to the approach and differentiates integrated applications from a collection of systems that have been kludged together to communicate with one another.

Chapter 1 also gives a classification of five different approaches to application integration. This is followed in Part II with a chapter about each approach. The value here is twofold: (1) the approaches can be viewed as design patterns (with some effort because each approach is presented in a slightly different way), and (2) techniques such as SEI's architecture trade-off analysis method (ATAM) can be applied from a technical perspective to select the best approach for a specific environment. Part III is devoted to the technology that an architect will have at his or her disposal to apply to the integration. Starting with an introduction to middleware in chapter 7, this part of the book ends at chapter 13 after thoroughly covering the strengths and weaknesses of each middleware model and associated components. What impressed me the most about this part of the book is the matter-of-fact, unbiased discussion. The author used products for examples, but did not favor any particular one, which is a refreshing change from some books on the topic that read like vendor literature.

Integration standards are covered in Part IV, with the same unbiased approach used in the preceding part, and with the same frank discussions of strengths and weaknesses. Key standards (both De Facto and De Jure) are covered, including XML, RosettaNet's methods, BizTalk and XSLT. The part of the book also devotes a chapter to understanding supply chain integration and ends with a final chapter titled B2B Application Integration Moving Forward. This final chapter is packed with advice and things to consider, such as moving from EDI to XML, discussions on security, performance and stability, etc.

Mr. Linthicum has done a thorough job of covering the complex issues associated with transforming existing systems into an integrated suite of applications that will support B2B. I like the way he has structured the book, which allows an architect to derive design patterns as well as perform formal trade-off analysis at the technical level for both the architecture and the building blocks with which to build the architecture - or rather, to transform an existing architecture into one that fully supports B2B. This book should be on the desk of every system architect and gets a solid five stars.